RABBIT SKIN by Nicolas KIEFFER -

RABBIT SKIN by Nicolas KIEFFER - Éditions Du Seuil (27 rue Jacob, Paris) - 1994 - 423 pages - Softcover. An American psychiatric clinic in the middle of the mountains, as comfortable as a luxury hotel. Life there goes by quietly. Admittedly, Tibbets, the one-legged man, is vainly searching for his leg, Kemp believes he is an astronaut who fell from the sky. As for the therapists, they are doing well, thank you. We are not going to quibble over this absence of dreams that Duane, the junior psychiatrist, alluded to. Nor about the difficulty Coleman, the director of the establishment, has in providing his son with “stories”, even though he hears all sorts of things. And then a new inmate arrives, Virgil Stilton. Who accuses himself of having killed sixty people, no less. The catch is that the victims died of natural causes. Admittedly, he has a few small problems: his inability to keep friends quiet, his total lack of memory. So, he makes up memories. The trouble is that they are other people's memories. But, frankly, the arrival of the new guy cannot explain the insidious change that is taking place among the patients and therapists. For example, rabbits start to proliferate, and not only on the huge fresco painted by Tim and in the center of which there is a “siphon”, a kind of void paradoxically endowed with a great power of attraction.